This is a draft of the introduction to a book I am working on called The Humanity of Private Law – which book will attempt to present a new account of private law as centred around the promotion of a particular vision of human flourishing.

As well as introducing the main claims of the book, this introduction also discusses: (1) economic and Kantian explanations of private law; (2) the explanations of tort law put forward by John Goldberg and Benjamin Zipursky, and by John Gardner; (3) the nature of corrective justice; (4) the nature of morality; (5) the justifiability of strict legal duties to succeed; (6) the difference between explanations and evaluations of private law; and (7) three different models of human flourishing.